Does Time = Money?

Does Time = Money?

2018-12-18T01:26:55+00:00

We’ve all heard the phrase “time is money”, and for most people this is probably true, as they have to trade their time for a paycheck. In our humble opinion, time is infinitely more important than money, as money comes and money goes, but time just goes. We’ve spent many years chasing the passive income dream, and it has most definitely been worth it, but it has had some interesting side effects.

When the book “The 4 Hour Work Week” came out, it really resonated both with us and millions of others around the world. It helped define the kind of entrepreneurship that we were all about. We weren’t interested in raising capital so that we could fund a multi-million dollar startup that we could could sell off or go public with and retire to the Bahamas. Instead, we just wanted a few hundred bucks a week coming in semi-passively, so that we could go live in Thailand and choose what we did when we got out of bed in the morning. Something Tim Ferriss described as “Lifestyle Design”.

We managed to achieve this pretty early on – it wasn’t the biggest of goals (although it seemed pretty big at the start). Something interesting happened along the way though. We decided we really enjoyed building businesses (enjoyment wasn’t a factor in our original goals), and once we had the time we had craved, it only seemed natural to keep building on our little business, as well as start more. So while we set out to create time, once the time became available, an increase in cashflow followed naturally. Now our businesses generate a lot more cashflow than our original goals, although our base level of $300-500 a week still stands, no matter what happens to our businesses going forward.

Part of the reason why we make sure every new business we build passes the “time” test (in that we have to be able to make it at least 95% passive), is not just to ensure that we stick to our original life plan, but also because we now know that it naturally leads to more wealth.